The re-keying tax: five packages of work, one environment

Follow a borehole log through a typical consultancy. It is entered into a logging tool. Its strata are re-entered into a ground-modelling package. Its parameters are re-typed into design spreadsheets. Its governing section is redrawn in a finite-element pre-processor. Its conclusions are re-written in a word processor. One dataset, five tools, four hand-offs — and at every hand-off, a person re-keys what a machine already knew.

The real cost is not the typing

The hours are bad enough. The deeper cost is drift. The moment data exists in five places, the five places disagree: the model reflects the revised log, the spreadsheet the original, the report a mixture. Reviewers find the inconsistencies, or worse, they do not. Every consultancy has a war story about a report figure that no longer matched the model behind it.

Compression, not integration

The industry's usual answer is integration: file exchange formats and plug-ins that shuttle data between the five tools. It helps, but the five databases remain, and so does the drift. The stronger answer is compression: one environment where the log, the model, the sections, the design checks and the report draw on a single data spine. Change the log and everything downstream re-derives. Nothing is re-typed, so nothing drifts.

What this looks like in practice

• AI parses the raw logs into structured soil units an engineer can inspect and correct.
• The 3D model, cross-sections and screening analytics compute from those units directly.
• Design calculators seed their parameters from the model; lab results join the same project.
• The report embeds figures captured from the live model — and detailed analysis exports (AGS4, PLAXIS 2D, DXF) carry the same data onward.

This is the architecture of Strats3D, and it is the pattern we apply across every Greenshift product: the deliverable and the data are never allowed to be two different things.